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The fight for the Web OS is now officially on.
This isn't about dominating the desktop/OS, it's about becoming the next standard for application development. It's about controlling the environment that applications rely on.
Right now that's just the UI/browser interaction, and both apollo and silverlight are positioning their value based on essentially being a more powerful browser experience. OVer time that dependance will expand to include local PC interaction, storage and interapp messaging standards. The potential for domination is extensive, and it's going to be very seductive to programmers who just want to get their apps done.
And then comes web services. Microsoft will use the ease of access to create a 'default' market for storage, microtransactions, search and advertising.
It's brilliant, it's well thought out, it's extremely well positioned and adobe is out of its league. They simply can't match the breadth of services, developer tools and userbase. Flash just plain sucks for apps.
But there's one significant flaw/issue in the plan: silverlight's value is in creating "rich" apps. Unfortunately rich apps don't currently fit into the economy of the web; they're generally not accessible by search engines, and that means you're missing out on the strong current at the centre of the river. It's not something developers can ignore.
So watch for microsoft to introduce clever ways to bridge the gap between rich applications and the current search world. It will come in the form of an XML standard for exposing hidden rich data in simple forms, including a bridging mechanism to get from the search results to the rich app.
Really good insight into what's going on. However, I think there's another very important element involved - the humble developer.
Both Adobe and Microsoft agree that in order to gain traction and hold a position of market leadership within the online/offline rich media application space, the key is going to be developer love. Developers lead to applications which in turn lead to market penetration.
And the key to developer love will most likely be an appreciation of the open source community, and a respect for standards.
Adobe are in the process of releasing Flex to the open source community, and already base Actionscript 3.0 almost entirely on ECMA script. Microsoft have yet to demonstrate how, or indeed if, it will follow suit.
Visual Studio integration and native CLR support are huge leaps forward in RAD development, but these same leaps may yet be offset within the developer community by:
Visual Studio licensing costs vs Open Source Developer Toolkits
Windows hosting costs vs Linux based hosting costs
Standards based development vs Proprietary development
Realistically, I think things will remain very much the same. The long tail will allow for more than one player; Anti-Microsoft open source developers will continue to flock to any alternative; Microsoft developers will stay with what they know and trust; Web Services will continue to grow in capability and will continue to be platform agnostic; and, both camps will love the competition and the resulting speed at which toolsets emerging and evolving for cross platform / cross browser applications.
Exciting times...
IMHO
... even if I can't spell Linux
There's no requirement for windows based hosting.
And MS say they will support open source dev tools; well, not really support, just not stop.
And C# is standard already isn't it?
(and are we comparing this to Adobe?)
I guess that's partly my point, how can we now be in a situation where it's only adobe in the fight. Sad.
There's no requirements for windows based hosting til you try to take advantage of sql server, where the costs really start to weigh in.
Microsoft vs Adobe is a big part of the picture currently, definitely not the whole picture, but a very big part of it.
Other languages, containers, toolkits and environments set out to cover part of the picture, but both Adobe and Microsoft appear to be trying to tackle the entire picture, and I think that's what people are watching - Service development, UI development, Rich UI development, and all theoretically OS independant, environment independant, browser independant, shared and possibly connection independant.
Whether this is something that can be achieved or even should be achieved is not something I really have an opinion on yet. Im just watching from the sidelines, but Microsoft weighing into the Rich UI space is something I'm all for. Flash has had no real competition in the RAD rich UI development space, and competition can only be good for everyone.
Imagine developing in a world where it's easy to take advantage of both online and offline containers and services, and where you can develop once for Widget, Gadget, Website, Application and Appliance, and where you know that not only will the framework you are using transparently handle scaling and parallelism, load balancing and spiking, but where real world access to grid computing makes the hardware side of things truly accessible and transparent as well. The possibilities are amazing. This is a space I'm really looking forward to working in, regardless of who the players are. Like I said earlier, exciting times...
Adobe weighing into the software development space. Microsoft weighing into the design space. Amazon weighing into hosting. Who'd have thought?
Maybe I should just shut up now I don't have the answers. I just love the discussion topic. It's something that really interests me, and am actually really excited about what's going on - not that you'd be able to tell
If I were doing another startup now I would be looking very closely into rich-media application integrated advertising system.
what hinders you from doing another startup?
anyway, I'd really like to see a comparison chart between apollo and silverlight
I'm busy enough with second - plus helping out on my first one.
well also we are forgetting JavaFX (Sun).. sun can easy gain traction in these arene with its already masives pool of developers..
Here's the result of a poll on Read/Write Web. Summary: developers would prefer browsers doing this stuff natively, and have little time for JavaFX.
And so, we have the emergence of another player - fairly obvious that these guys were coming, but at least they are coming onto the scene with a great offering from day 1...
http://mashable.com/2007/05/30/google-gears/
"Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline."
